Cultures and Ethics of Sharing - Universität Innsbruck

40 Katharine Sarikakiscome as these may be, they do come with some considerable delay, given the track recordof SNS and their continuing approach to privacy, at regular intervals. Moreover, theseinitiatives are the outcome of compromises between pressures for the updating of legalframeworks (with regards to human rights and right to privacy) and those for abandoninginterventions in the processes of the SNS market.Social media push the boundaries of privacy, not in favour of something new replacingolder or outdated provisions or on the basis of ‘public demand’, but in favour of a systemthat poses no restrictions on social media companies themselves. The ability to collect,monitor, manipulate and then pass on data to third commercial and state parties through‘leisure’ is probably a grand act of manipulation. Copyright and ownership are two separateareas of policy that come together in social media sharing. Human connection in thisform (holiday pictures, ‘mood statements’, files, information on others, maps etc) is notnamed labour, because it occupies the spaces between production and consumption.Moreover, it takes place on the basis of ‘free will’ and consensus, and under such conditionswhereby private communication traffic channels assign copyrighted properties tountil now non-copyrighted materials. Users have no knowledge of or control over when,how often, to what extent and purposes their personal information is ‘shared’ with thirdparties. Applications run by ‘developers’ on Facebook have access to personal information,violating this way the ‘least authority’ design principle. These are all specific,technologically enabled and purpose tailored tactics within which the law is challenged toengage. Given the timeframes within which policy processes take place and the speedychanges companies such as this operate with, it is doubtful whether laws will have anylong lasting effect on Facebook. It is at this point where the gaps in policy leave users andcitizens navigating through the enticing promises of borderlessness at a price: not onlydoes information constitute the monetised exchange unit, but it becomes also the foundationof a future, where, forming the basis of privacy, it erodes the right to privacy as outdatedand anachronistic. In such a future, past lives will haunt and colour new beginningscontributing decisively to social sorting and profiling. The need to be able and ‘introduce’one’s self afresh, the right to anonymity, as well as the ‘right’ to be forgotten, to changeone’s mind, to start again will turn impossible to maintain and pursue.3. Reflections on sharing on social media as labour and controlThe context of the internet is conducive to acts of sharing- as both internet and sharing arebased on the understanding of ‘freedom’ to association and the enhanced active presenceof the parties involved. Whether seen predominantly in the form of participatory culture(Jenkins, 2006) or generative technology (Zittrain, 2008), and certainly in most cases as ahybrid of both, the internet has facilitated and allowed for the broadest possible involvementof people in constructing, creating, configuring and controlling (its) content. Thisform of cultural and market value, the polymorphic production and distribution of new